NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20986, 24 September 1931, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

SCIENCE AMORAL. "There is a striking moral indifference about the scientific movement," says Dr. Leo Wolf, professor of New College, in his contribution to a recent publication. "Whether we desire ploughs on the one hand or machine guns on the other, science will come to our aid with equal willlingness and efficiency. If we desire chlorine gas, science will help us to prepare it and will then enable us to use it either for bleaching yarns or for poisongas. These are but two instances of a perfectly general feature. No amount of science can settle the direction in which science itself is to be applied. Strictly speaking, science gives no lead. It is not designed and cannot be adapted to lead. The man himself must do that."

THIS INDOLENT GENERATION. "We all know the kind of life which is one of discontinuity," said Dr. Temple, Archbishop of York, at a meeting of the Church of England Men's Society. "It is summed up in the familiar saying, 'Life is one damn thing after another.' That is what life may be, and will be, unless you make it different. The snare of our generation is to be found in the possibility of being endlessly, though also innocently, amused. It is a very real snare, because though all might know that a life of a series of amusements was a futile, and therefore a miserable, one, yet at any given moment each opportunity for amusement is very attractive and at the moment it seems more attractive than something which will call for more effort on our part. Broadcasting is doing an admirable service, but even listening to the most magnificent expositions of the present state of science by soino leading master of it will only be "a form of idleness if all we do is to allow it to flow over our minds and not try to mako anything of it."

ADVANTAGES OF THE DAY SCHOOL. Fifty years ago, Sir Daniel Hall, the authority on agriculture, was head boy at Manchester Grammar School. He was invited to distribute the prizes at the school this year and in his address emphasised the advantages of education at a great city day school. "I know that this is not the conventional point of view, and that England points with pride to what we commonly call 'public schools'—Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the rest," he said. "It would be idle to deny their dignity, the imposing roll of great men who belong to them, or the service they have rendered in maintaining the ideal of a 'gentleman.' But in their woll-de-scrved pride and self-sufficiency lies a danger. They are societies apart, which impress upon their members a scale of values of their own in which the prime purpose of the school—learning—finds little part. They create a feeling that it is enough to have been a member of the club, only achievements within its ambit are of much account. Your advantage—and it is a lasting one—is that you are spending your formative years among men and women who are at work in the everyday world. By daily contact you get to know how people live, your acquaintance with that large majority of British folk, the weekly wage-earners, is not confined to domestic servants and cricket professionals. It is no small thing that you have access to museums, galleries, libraries and the like, and that" you are in the way of meeting people who are making things. Above all, you are in a school where everyone realises that ho has got to work."

THE POST-WAR GOLD STANDARD. Commenting on tho report of tho Macmillan Committee on banking, finance and credit, Barclays Bank Monthly Review says tho manner in which the gold standard system has operated since its restoration by the principal European countries after the war has differed considerably from the way in which it functioned prior to 1914. A much greater degree of currency and credit management has been introduced by tho various central banks and there has been a tendency to restrict the automatic character of tho system, which formerly used to be considered one of its greatest safeguards. During tho last two or three years, both the United States and France have not employed the amounts due to them from abroad in the way in which Great Britain as a creditor nation has always employed hers, namely, in additional imports or in making additional foreign long-term loans. On the contrary, they have required payment of a large part of their annual surplus either in gold or in short-term liquid claims, their high protectionist tariffs tending to prevent their debtors from paying in goods. The writer quotes a summary from the report showing the distribution of gold in central banks and treasuries between creditor countries (Great Britain, the United States, France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Sweden) and debtor countries (all others, excluding Spain and Russia). This shows that at January 1, 1929, of gold amounting to £1,957,000,000 creditor countries held 65 por cent.; on tho same date this year their holdings were £287,000,000 greater and represented 74£ per cent, of a total of £2,095,000,000, thoso of debtor countries having declined from 35 to 25i per cent. There is obviously a limit to payments in gold by the debtor countries and a breakdown is inevitable unless the movement which has been taking place during the past two years is arrested. The position has been greatly accentuated by tho reparation and war debt payments. The broad principle upon which international trade is based is an exchange of goods between the different countries, but if the reparation and war debt annuities are effectively to be made, they involve not a reciprocal movemont, but a flow of goods or gold in one direction only.